The Magician and the Dying Wife

     She insists someone has removed the doorknobs from all the doors because she has trouble finding them in the night. And it is almost always night inside the house where she is dying. Blankets have been placed over those curtains which were not sufficient. Rooms have been soundproofed in unusual ways, tamped with piles of dolls she used to collect, or even pillows in some cases. This would be troubling to outsiders were they to see this, but no outsiders are allowed into the house of the dying one, which may only be looked at from the outside. It is sealed effectively as an ancient myth.

     Sometimes, the dying wife runs her fingers back and forth across the doors, seeking the knobs, but all she encounters, with increasing panic, is smooth paint. She can't even find the holes where she imagines the doorknobs were previously located. Not even with her ridiculous, long, pretty fingernails. Sometimes she curses, sometimes she cries: the usual schtick of the dying.

     Sometimes, the dying wife later realizes she has been standing against a wall and not a door in the dimness, trying to open it. Sometimes she curses, sometimes she merely laughs--schtick for herself only, since she is alone.

     Her husband is no longer a magician. The difficult economy has obviated any need for frivolous things like coffee shops or electronic pets that sing pop songs to children or magicians. He works all night in a small restaurant in a strip mall that's always open. He learns to speak the languages of drunks and the insane as he serves them food in the middle of the night. He notices how much their languages share grammar and concepts, how much of their languages is driftwood, really.

     The dying wife finds these nights alone very difficult. There is a cruel mirror in her private bathroom that holds all the radiance of the world, that magnifies like an evilly perceptive god or surgeon's eye.

     The dying wife finds herself involuntarily drawn to this mirror in the night. She is drawn to it like a snake to an oasis, and the radiance kills her bit by bit. Snakes hate radiance, though they live in it. The blaze of God's desert maddens them. This is why characters in stories sometimes have sympathy for serpents as they crush them underfoot. Characters in stories are usually more perceptive, more empathetic than us. We accept the fraying rope bridge of the narrative over the gulf, because what else is there? That is why we read books filled with stories. Our magic twins will do these things for us, and we will be spared the messy work. Or so the theory goes. Of course, we aren't really spared any such thing. But if you believe the blurbs and the critics, you might buy into this vicarious roadmap theory of literature for a few blissfully ignorant years or decades. Stories? Another strange economy in a world of strange economies.

     One morning the former magician arrives home to find his wife in bed delirious and screaming, her manicured hands scrambling madly in the forest of her long black hair. He sees black birds, manic ravens, swarming her hair, entangled in her long ringlets, scratching her face and scalp. They are pulling strands of hair from her head and making horrible noises like desperate old cokeheads fucking.

     The dying wife is even more horrified to realize the door to the bedroom has opened and that her husband is watching this, her shame, so she laughs in her horror, not knowing what else to do.

     Her husband smiles at her from the doorway, the smile of a Goya painting, but one of the less cruel paintings.

     He knows these are her former lovers, this contagion of claws. He feels a pity like moss. Like moss around his heart. He laughs at his own stupidity as he tamps the moss with imaginary fingers. But then he acts.

     The unemployed magician, just returned from a grueling night of work, knows he must use the old skills. They rest in his body like fibromyalgiac muscles, the old spells. He waves a spoon and the ravens are transformed into white mice that fall kerplump softly on his wife's gold and silver tasseled pillows, and the rodents begin to sing a tiny stupid song which makes the dying wife smile now, as she fixes her hair. Dignity is restored momentarily to the bed of the dying. When the mice are done, they scatter like Munchkins from Oz.

     All is well. She smiles at her husband. He sits beside her on the bed and lays breakfast, like a map of a gorgeous foreign country neither of them will ever visit. She, because she is dying. He, because he will spite that country. They smile a beautiful lie into each other. They know the gods forgive them everything. Because their lives were just Kleenex.

     When the dying wife finally does "live up to her diagnosis" and dies, the magician rarely sleeps, but walks through the house day after day, night after night, transforming things with his dusty wand, the one he actually used in "the old days" in his act. When the economy could support magic.

     He stares at the house filled with years' worth of accumulated treasure and junk. All of these objects are now to be travelers. The house smells like an airport. Where to begin the great shuffle of all this shaped and battered matter? He feels daunted, so he feels playful. He stretches his fingers like a violinist warming up.

     He turns an end table into a marble coffin with a glass window through which his dead wife smiles and waves like a magician's assistant, then changes his mind and makes it an end table again, but a garish one nobody would want. He transforms an opalescent swan-necked vase the dead wife liked into a chatty goldfinch, which flees the place of death instantly through the front door of the OPEN HOUSE he is having that Saturday morning.

     He waves his wand before the evil radiant mirror which tortured his dead wife, and it becomes a glass of champagne. He pours this into the cat's dish. The dead wife's cat drinks it and looks up at him with her late Saturday night smile. He turns the cat into a second goldfinch, and it gratefully pursues the first one, which it can just see on the horizon, in a greatly confused instinct.

     He feels only the slightest queasiness as he spoons cereal from a bowl which is levitating in front of his chest.

     When the former magician remarries, he takes only a few elements of his wife's spirit with him to his new home. He keeps the essence of her sweetish breath in a particularly sinuous vase. He keeps the essence of her wandering voice in a pillow in a back closet of the new house. He retains her ridiculous coveting of luxury in a single leather glove that he keeps in the glove box of his new car, a sleek car which is a gift from his obedient new wife, who is very much alive and not dying even a bit. He likes knowing that the glove is there, along with an odd assortment of things including a tire pressure gauge, a collapsible cup and for some silly reason, a compass. A gift from his new wife.

     "What would a magician want with a compass?" he often asks himself as he drives too fast and is magically never clocked on radar, never pulled off the comforting fluency of the highway.

     This question always makes him smile, always returns to him when he thinks of the glove, then--invariably--the compass, ridiculous objects sharing space in the dark compartment. And now ridiculously grammatically linked in his mind.

     In a way, this question takes the place of the entire relationship which has vanished, takes the place of the many torturous and tortuous years he has shared with the dead wife. Takes the place of many unanswerable questions which might be asked, but won't be. Stands in nicely. It prevents any collapse in the structure composed of impossibly light girders he has built around the death of his once-wife, a consummate magic trick.

     "A house of cards has no fears," he tells his new son by the new wife, one sunny morning. Everything is constantly made new in this real house in which he explains this to his young son, while constructing a tall house of cards. (A perceptive outsider might notice only that the new wife vacuums too often.) He fixes his tiny son's eyes to his. "The only thing magic about this trick at all is how the fear is focused in the audience. They are staring at nothing at all. Just some paper arranged on a table. If it were to fall, it would mean nothing."

     The small round son looks at him with the joy of not understanding anything, and arranges some plastic bears on the carpet in a pattern he is just beginning to delightfully intuit might be something called a war.

     The economy has improved but the former magician decides to continually change careers, as a sort of evolution of magic itself.

     For now, he sells used cars. But next month? Perhaps a minister of God. And several months later, perhaps one of those restorers of ancient paintings who somehow loses the ability of ordinary lunchroom speech and considers the loss a gift. Especially in winter, he thinks. Because winter has its own radiance, the magican knows, though there are few who have any fucking clue how to reckon it.

     Maybe a few painters. A few writers of fairy tales. Some drunks which disappear quickly.

     Lesser characters mostly.